


The Passionate Shepherd

by Bakcheia



Category: Will (TV 2017)
Genre: Lies, M/M, Poor Life Choices, Pre-Canon, Spies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-13
Updated: 2020-12-13
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:14:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28046031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bakcheia/pseuds/Bakcheia
Summary: Alternative title: Thomas Walsingham, novice cat herder.
Relationships: Christopher Marlowe/Thomas Walsingham
Comments: 7
Kudos: 7
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	The Passionate Shepherd

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Vae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vae/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide!
> 
> Re-watched the series to write this fic and Christopher Marlowe is just as scorchingly hot as I remembered but no amount of pausing was able to tell me where he lives, or what the fuck is going on with the floorplan of the place. Literally half the research I did for this story was pausing on shots of Kit's house and I leaned nothing so please enjoy my many wild liberties.

Thomas is taking a sip of wine when Kit’s name is first mentioned. Not his name at all, to be quite accurate, just “ _that playwright”_ trickling between Topcliffe’s lips with fastidious disgust – but Thomas and his uncle both know at once who he means. Who anyone means right now whenever they say ‘that playwright’ and no more detail needed than that.

Thomas is nearly new to this business himself, but deception is a natural part of growing up who he is and what he was and he is able to swallow his wine – a rather nice Bordeaux – and put down his cup with no revealing show of dramatics. Topcliffe looks sharply at him anyway, a foxhound catching a thin thread of scent.

“A good choice, hmmmm? You know him quite well, don’t you?”

“I’ve seen his plays” Thomas hedges. Nearly everyone in London has seen Kit’s plays by now. Topcliffe sniffs.

“I’ve heard you’ve seen rather more of him than that.”

How much does he know? Thomas wonders. Not that it matters so much. His uncle demands no more of him than a good marriage and a legitimate heir and if Thomas chooses to spend his nights cavorting with tousle haired playwrights instead of at the whorehouse, well at least there’ll be no bastard children come knocking. Thomas is sure Topcliffe has worse secrets and staring at the thin, mocking face across the table from him he makes a mental note to find out what they are.

“I’ve seen enough to know he’s not reliable.”

There, let Topcliffe find the lie in that. It’s all he can find to say against the prospect though. Kit would make a fantastic spy, there’s no question. Any playwright could visit the filthiest bars and lowest houses with no one marking it, but one such as Kit will also find welcome in the great places; already his desk is overflowing with invitations written on thick, creamy paper, some of them enticingly scented with dabs of perfume, or cologne. Kit moves through society with a freedom even Thomas envies, kissing his actor’s lips one night and a lord’s hand the next, welcome everywhere, wanted by everyone, all the doors opening and their secrets spilling out like lamplight into his ringed, careless hands.

“I think it’s rather a good idea.” Lord Walsingham shoots an approving look over the table at Topcliffe, who preens like the absurd little creature he is. "These people are always hurting for money aren't they? I wonder how much he'll want?"

Thomas opens his mouth, then closes it again. If he presses now, Topcliffe will know for sure and certain there is something else and it will be a dagger held always to his throat.

Instead he takes another swallow of wine, plays with his fork and pretends to be bored; a foolish, foppish youth with no stakes in the matter. Waiting until he feels Topcliffe’s eyes slide elsewhere, looking for more rewarding corners to pry in.

As soon as he judges it safe he stands, stretches and saunters lazily to the door.

“Not going out, Thomas? At this hour?” His uncle looks at him with something that might be envy, Topcliffe with his face pinched closed with suspicion.

Thomas forces a smirk. He is a man who could be going anywhere; a late theatre performance, a brothel, some exclusive party where other young creatures like himself with pearls in their ears and yards of gold thread in their clothes will greet him ecstatically by name. Absolutely not a man who is about to book it through the streets of London to his lover’s house, there to beg, cajole and bribe him not to become an informant to the crown.

"Just for a little while." He inspects his immaculate reflection in a tiny silver mirror, makes a show of licking his finger and dabbing at an already neat eyebrow. A vein throbs traitorously at his temple. "I could use some lively company today." He angles the mirror just in time to catch Topcliffe's spasm of irritation. With any luck he'll waste what's left of the evening chewing over the implied insult instead of any small, revealing quirks of behavior that Thomas may have shown.

He bows to his uncle, waves a hand dismissively at Topcliffe and is gone into the evening, handsome, carefree, a man of many lovers and no love.

“Oh, for the energy of the young,” Lord Walsingham sighs at the departing back of his nephew and hopes Topcliffe will quickly finish his wine and be on his way. A useful man, certainly, but not one you’d keep around for pleasure.

* * *

A thousand deaths await a man in London, some sweet, some sinful, but most ugly, wretched, lonely affairs; tragedies muffled into dullness by the commonplace nature of their protagonist. Deaths from drink, from disease, from overwork, silent and swift at the hand of a creeping cutpurse or noisy and brutal in a fatal tavern brawl. Thomas is very determined to keep Kit from all of them, impossible as such a task may seem and made all the harder by Kit himself, who acts half the time like he thinks he cannot die and the other half as if he wishes he would.

Christopher Marlowe a spy for the crown. An absurd, almost blasphemous thought. His lovely, wild Kit, forced into circumspection, caution and danger, only ever an unwise word away from an unacceptably early grave. Thomas walks quickly, though he likely has days to resolve this and it is a soft, subtle evening made for gentle strolls and dreamy thoughts. He will not relax fully till he knows Kit is safe, and he will need Kit’s own consent for that,

Kit’s house is in one of the better parts of the city; the streets are wide and soiled with nothing worse than horse dung and wisps of straw, the neighbouring houses maintain a discreet distance from each other, like virtuous couples, too well built for the friendly drunken leanings of most of London’s lodging places.

Thomas lets himself in with the key Kit had given him. A house this size should have several servants, to cook, to clean and to open the door at a guest’s knock, but Kit cannot keep any of them for long. He forgets to hire them, to pay them if he does hire them and those he hires and pays he inevitably scandalises beyond all belief, or chases them out himself when he grows impatient with their interruptions and presence.

So instead there is The Key, given so casually, a convenience, an afterthought – but given to Thomas alone. Henslowe has no key, nor Greene, nor any of Kit’s limpid-eyed crowd of admirers, who huddle around him in the tavern, buying him drinks and vying with each other to see who can agree with him the best.

Kit has many lovers and makes no secret of it, but Thomas must be a favourite, surely, to be treated like this. Kit’s trust is a harder won thing than his cock and The Key is the proof of it.

So he lets himself in, as no one else in London can. The lamps in the hall are unlit and there’s no response to his hopeful call of “Kit?” but that doesn’t mean much. He stands still and stretches his senses into the shadowy hallway, listening for the tattle tale creak of a floorboard or the scritch-scratch of a busy pen. There; a yellow flickering light from under the closed study door, the barely audible sigh of burning logs shifting in the grate, a whisper of settling ash.

He pauses outside, trying to banish a ridiculous, childish Christmas-morning feeling, an almost painful twist of excitement he’d last felt creeping down the stairs in in dim dawn light, soundless in stockinged feet, for an early, forbidden look at the presents. It’s just Kit, after all, Kit who has become an every day occurrence in his life, whom he’d have surely seen tomorrow, if not tonight, and he is here on an unpleasant business. He resists the urge to smooth his perfectly arranged hair.

The scene behind the door is no annual novelty, but it makes the twist in his stomach one turn the tighter. Kit’s study is not a welcoming place, not even when softened in the mellow, homely glow of hearth and lamplight. Too much disorder, like a physical manifestation of Kit’s unquiet mind; spilled ink and broken-backed books, a dusty litter of occultism cluttering wine sticky surfaces and over everything a lingering smell of incense that comes and goes, tickling the back of his throat.

All an irrelevancy of course, because Kit himself is here, stretched out and sleeping in a mess of scavenged furnishings in front of the hearth. His beauty is made only the more holy by the contrast of his surroundings, mascaraed lashes lying long and feathery over his cheekbones, pale flesh turned to gilt in the light of the low burning lamps, a slender hand lying almost amongst the ashes. 

He has a bed of course, as wildly extravagant as Kit himself, big enough for a family and hung with festoons of heavy brocade. He never sleeps in it. Beds are for dying in, he says and sleeps at his desk, or on the stairs, or as now in a tumble of pillows of the floor and he makes Thomas join him there. Thomas doesn’t complain too much, it is enough to be where Kit is and if that should be in locations that bark his elbows and give him backache, well, then that is a small price to pay for love.

The room is dominated by a great wooden table, so large it is almost unfitted for it's purpose and almost entirely covered with papers, some blank, others blotched and scrawled with indecipherable letters in no alphabet that Thomas knows and he has had no common man’s education. Thomas finds himself drawn to them almost as much as to Kit; he is a spy after all, and his lover's heart is naturally a compelling mystery. One set is gathered together in a more orderly style, with a script neat enough it must be intended to be read by others. Thomas lifts the skull Kit has been using as a paperweight – and heaven knows he loves the man, but my God, when Thomas has given him several perfectly good glass ones – and picks up a sheet to read.

_I’ll help to slay their children and their wives, to fire their churches, pull their houses down..._

“Do you like it?”

Thomas starts guiltily and the page slips from his fingers. He grabs for it, just managing to snatch it from the air before it disappears forever amongst the drifts but knocks a candle flying with his elbow in the process – some spy he is. The candle, unlit, crashes to the floor, exploding into fragments of perfumed black wax that skitter away into shadowed corners, obliging Thomas to crab about the floor and pick them up or else risk finding them ground into his clothes for weeks.

Kit, now thoroughly woken, stares at him complacently from his nest of tattered silk. Clearly, he is in no suspense as to the answer; Thomas has never had anything but praise for his work, which is probably why Kit isn’t angry to find him reading it.

“It’s very powerful,” Thomas deposits the remains of the candle on one of the least cursed looking papers, kicks off his boots and crawls in next to Kit, who greets him with a smile but makes him wriggle about to find his own comfortable spot. Pray God he loses this habit before they are old men, with spines and joints to consider. “But I prefer the poem you wrote.”

“The one with the shepherd?”

“Hmm. _Come_ _live_ _with me_ _and be my love..._ ” He touches the back of his hand to Kit’s high cheekbone, taking a moment to admire him up close and Kit lies there, naked in the fireglow, and lets himself be admired, as confident in his body as in his writing. Thomas has no respect for Kit's crowd of sycophants but at moments like these he can't help but understand them.

“Well, it’s no Tamburlaine, this new piece, but a man burns to death at the end, so it’ll probably make me a fortune.”

“Thus speaks London’s greatest artist.”

“Thus speaks London’s greatest artist, in his fine house which he would like to keep. The world makes mercenaries of us all. Pick the right religion and even God’s forgiveness is for sale.”

Kit is as shameless in his greed as in all his vices, and it gives them an exotic gloss that almost looks like innocence. Certainly, Thomas holds none of them against him as he might if he found the same qualities in a lesser man.

How much money will Kit want to be a spy for the crown? Less, certainly, than the crown is willing to pay. Not as much as he is worth to Thomas, alive and well and waiting to be kissed. And how much is he, Thomas, worth in return? Enough to be listened to? Enough that when his paltry, desperate will is pitted against the might and gold of the England, love will tip the scales in his favour and Kit will turn down fortune and intrigue at his asking?

Kit has an old lover with rotting lungs who has hidden himself away somewhere. Thomas had met him once or twice; a nondescript artist with neither beauty, nor, to his mind any particular talent and old enough to be father to both of them. And yet he had been able to manage Kit, a feat almost as unbelievable as controlling the tides.

“Sit still, Wasp,” he would order, and Kit, the great Christopher Marlowe, would sit and pose for hours at a time with his head held high and steady, his eyes fixed with terrible intensity on those of his king’s, until even Thomas’s patience gave out and he lost the game, if game it was, and went home.

He wonders what would happen if he tried it now, with Kit languid and passive as a petted cat in his arms.

_Stay away from Topcliffe, Wasp._

Kit has turned from him to gaze into the red belly of the fire, his expression as inscrutable and remote as a greek marble. The wavering glow casts shadows over his pretty face and brings strange lights to his eyes, making him look more than mortal. Can it be so hard to say a handful of words when others have come so easily? Thomas has written him sonnets and felt no offence when Kit laughed at them.

He is not normally such a coward. He is a powerful man, most of the time, born with half a fortune already and the other half of it a near certainty. He has been giving people orders before he knew how to properly lace his boots, and rarely been required to obey them in return. Even his uncle only makes requests of him these days, though the requests have an edge to them that Thomas would not like to test. A powerful man indeed and even, perhaps, a loved one, with a space made special in Kit’s life that will fit no one else but him and would be left aching and empty if he were not in it.

So why in this is he inexplicably, infuriatingly, the inferior of Barrett Emmerson, a man who hasn’t even the breath to climb the stairs, let alone fuck anybody? How could one such as Kit bear to have his leash looped about his neck?

How absurd that Thomas, who will be a lord one day, will never be Kit’s king and so must lie in silent consternation with one hand pressed over the black heart inked on his lover’s chest, while Kit stares past him into the fire and sees things he doesn’t share.

_Stay away from Topcliffe, Kit._

Thomas will not win this fight by playing to another man’s strengths. He tries a more familiar tactic.

“Do you need money, Kit?”

“Why, do you think I should start charging?” Kit’s glorious attention has snapped back to him. He kisses Thomas, deeply, searchingly then abruptly pushes him away, leaving his lips idiotically mouthing the empty air, his eyes dropping to Kit's outstretched hand.

“Two shillings.” Kit demands, and laughs at his startled face.

“I’m serious, Kit. My uncle wants you to serve the crown. He’ll probably offer you a lot of money, more than Tamburlaine made you. More than most people in this city see in a year.”

“I’m suddenly feeling very patriotic.”

“I want you to turn him down.”

It is perilously close to an order. Kit eyes him incredulously.

“I don’t see how what you want has any relevancy here, in my home and career. I suppose you only know this because you’ve just come from Topcliffe yourself.” He bares his teeth at Thomas, an expression half snarl, half sneer “That’s a fine hypocrisy.”

“It’s different for me Kit.” Thomas’s voice has taken on a soft, placating note. Even to himself he sounds pathetic, no better than one of the cur dogs who cringe around the marketplace, begging for scraps. It’s not impressing Kit that much either, by the looks of him, Thomas has seen more warmth in the face of a graveyard angel.

“And how, exactly, is it different?”

Thomas can name a dozen ways with no thought at all. It’s different because Thomas is the only heir to the Queen’s spymaster. It’s different because his rank and standing make him someone who will be missed, someone too important to be murdered, someone who, when he dies of some innocent cause, will have his body buried in state in a churchyard and not be left to bloat and burst in some London gutter, or lime pit. It is different because Kit, no matter how much Thomas assures him otherwise, will always be fundamentally lesser in the eyes of the world, permitted in Thomas’s life only on sufferance, a plaything to be discarded whenever his uncle should ask. Kit knows all this himself, of course, but it is essential to his pride that Thomas at least plays into the illusion that he doesn’t.

“Well, I’m, I mean...” Thomas pauses, trapped. He has been with Kit for over a year now, longer by far than any of his past lovers, he has loved him and coddled him and bought him little things, they have talked over all the world together and fucked each other in a thousand ways and places, in the muffling darkness of prop closets and under the stretch of the starry heavens. Everything that lovers do, he and Kit have done together, save one. Never in all their time together has Thomas implied that Kit might in any way be deficient.

“You’re what?” Kit demands, drawing back from their embrace. “Go on then. What are you, that I am not?”

Thomas takes a deep breath, reminds himself that his uncle is principle secretary to the queen, and drags his faltering gaze up to meet Kit’s.

“You’re not...you’re not sensible, Kit”

Kit owns a truly unnecessary number of skulls and Thomas could swear that right now each one of them is goggling at him in empty-eyed horror.

 _He’s going to kill me_ , he thinks, nervously eyeing Kit’s shocked face and the frozen curl of his lip. _H_ _e’s going to take away my key, he’s going to write a play in which a man called Womas Talsingham is wrong about everything and dies stupidly halfway through._

But Kit is beginning to laugh, uproariously. The skulls grin toothily down at the pair of them; clearly the sliver of spine he has shown is to be taken as some delightful novelty. He has done it, he has stood in opposition to the great Christopher Marlowe, insulted him even and nothing terrible has come of it. The fire burns merrily in the grate, Kit’s laughter sputters to a halt then starts up again as soon as me meets Thomas’s eyes.

“Go on,” he prods, delighted, “Do another one.”

“Atheist” Thomas accuses, kissing his grinning lips, tasting his mirth, “heretic, pseudo-philosophic cocksucker. Witch.”

Marlowe throws back his head and howls. Maybe that was the secret, then. Barret’s inexplicable hold over Kit no more than the confident bluster held in common by half the ageing artists in the city. Well, if Kit liked him all the better for his boldness then he would be a lion for him. Tell him straight out that Topcliffe was too much for him to handle, the game too dangerous for him to play. He will cup Kit’s jaw, as if he is going to kiss him again, push a hand into his rumpled hair to hold him fast and tell him...

 _If you love me, you’ll do_ _as I say_ _._

He cannot do it. Barrett is, so far as he knows, a living man and yet his cold, crowned ghost lies between them and Thomas cannot bear the idea that it has a power over Kit that he never will. After all, how can Kit’s love ever be proved wanting, if he never asks for proof at all?

“I’ll pay you,” he says instead, already mentally making the arrangements. A deferred bill here and there, an emerald earring of which he is not overfond, a debt or two called in. “Whatever they offer you, I will match it and you won’t have to do a thing, just stay here and write whatever you want and not worry about whether the public will favour it or no.”

Kit gives a small sigh and shifts closer; poor Barrett’s ghost is snuffed out by the press of their bodies like the flame of a dying candle.

“To write whatever I want...” His voice has the rough slur of sleep in it. The ninth bell was striking when Thomas unlocked the door to Kit’s house and outside it is barely dark, but Marlowe keeps strange, changeable hours. Likely he will be up at sometime past midnight, wanting to write, or for Thomas to take him somewhere exciting, slipping through the liminal spaces of the city on streets that are theirs alone.

“Tired?” Thomas asks, trying to arrange the both of them more comfortably. Kit lets himself be pulled about, knowing that whatever position Thomas finds for them will be favourable to himself at least. The room is warm as a caress, Thomas’s hand trails slow, soothing patterns over his ribs and back and Kit can rest his head on his chest and be rocked by the steady pull of air in and out of his healthy, working lungs. He is asleep in minutes.

Thomas happily resigns himself to spending the next few hours, fully clothed, on the floor.

* * *

Kit is in Topcliffe’s house. Not his home, where he keeps his mealy mouthed wife and their two pampered children and chooses always to wear the mask of a benevolent patriarch, with his pockets full of ready pennies. No, his other house, where he conducts business and has the tools of his trade delivered in long boxes, lined with black velvet. The contents of these boxes have odd, innocent names; Spanish boots, the Pear, pitchcaps and, most whimsical of all, Skevington’s daughter. Thomas knows Kit is there because a puffing street child has just told him so – Thomas had engaged him to watch at the door for fivepence a day.

He is half the city away when he finds out, miles of twisting, crowded streets between them and though Thomas is no athlete he runs, snarling at anyone who doesn’t get out of his way fast enough, ducking through the gaps between market stalls and squeezing past the hairy, chestnut rumps of dray horses. He doesn’t slow down until he is close enough to Topcliffe’s territory to have to worry about how he will appear to him and he must stop awhile outside his door altogether to wait for his breath to steady and to sleek the wrinkles from his fine jacket.

He knocks, and must wait again for the servant to let him in, and then again to be announced. In front of him lies a long stone corridor and another door, shut fast. He makes himself miserable imagining what is behind it. A revealing sweat is soaking through at his armpits and at the small of his back, Topcliffe is sure to notice it and draw whatever conclusions please him best.

The servant opens the door and ushers Thomas through to what, he rather suspects, is a deliberately planned spectacle. Topcliffe has left him waiting so that he can see this moment; Marlowe standing with his hand outstretched, the bargain almost struck, too late for anything but the most obvious and absurd of interferences.

Thomas staggers, and sweats through his silks and does nothing.

Topcliffe’s eyes flick between him and Marlowe, then he reaches out to clasp Kit’s offered hand, pauses, as if in repulsion, but then when he does take it he holds it too long, and so tightly that the blood is pressed from under his thumbnail in a little half moon of white flesh. His gloves lie next to him on the table. A coincidence? Or had he taken them off in anticipation of this moment, wanting to feel Marlowe’s skin rubbing against his own?

Kit looks down at their joined hands in surprise, feeling the pinch of pain, and when he looks up again there is a subtle, sly, _knowing_ in his eyes and a mocking twist to his lovely mouth. Briefly he looks the more dangerous of the two, with Topcliffe limp and cringing, hooked, like a fish on a line though it is he who has caught up Kit’s hand and will not let it go.

The moment stretches out, taunt and cutting as fine wire, then Topcliffe tears himself away with an awkward jerk, reaching for his gloves and Kit turns to Thomas, beaming, broadcasting their affection for all the world to see, right under Topcliffe’s wrinkling nose.

And there it is, right there in his high held head and arrogant blue eyes, in the strut in his walk, heeled boots clacking loud and fearless on the stone flagged floor, a floor which is forever having the blood mopped off it; _this is the man you are so afraid of, the man you paid me to stay away from_ _–_ _this wretched, weak, godly little pervert?_

Behind his turned back Topcliffe is staring after him, pupils gone pinprick small with fury, mouth a bloodless slit in his twitching face and Thomas, never so angry with Kit that he cannot be scared for him, moves with quick strides to put himself between his lover and that terrible gaze.

“Marlowe,” he greets, coldly, though his heart is leaping in his chest and he is sure all his love and fear must be shining from his eyes, clear as a beacon light and his tone fooling nobody.

“Tommy!” He is welcomed with deliberate, infuriating exuberance. No one has ever been this inanely happy to see him in his life. Kit pumps his hand, punches his shoulder, does everything but belch in his ear. The crude display of masculinity sits grotesquely on his fair, fey features, clashes wildly with his dangling pearl earring and sends Topcliffe into a spasm of disgust and bafflement. A much more effective ruse than Thomas’s own poor mummery of indifference, he must admit, not that it makes being on the receiving end of it any more enjoyable.

He simmers resentfully as Kit throws a friendly arm around him and tows him from the house, before he even has time to think of an excuse for his unexpected presence, let alone give one. Just two young idiots, a boorish playwright and his degenerate, aristocratic friend, going to spend the night in some alehouse, where they will shout bawdy poems at the tap maids and go home to separate beds with women neither will remember. Topcliffe is left clutching at the empty air, Thomas swears he can hear the leather of his gloves creaking but he knows better to turn and look. They are gay, careless and ignorant. No more than they are supposed to be, caring for nothing, suspecting nothing.

The door slams behind them with unnecessary force. Topcliffe has been robbed of his dramatics, the pleasant little scene he must have been concocting ever since he put forward Marlowe’s name. How he must have been looking forward to it. Thomas bursting through the door and pulling a protesting Marlowe into his arms, offering anything if Topcliffe would just promise to leave him alone, to turn his eyes to other, lesser men. The exposure of himself, not merely as a sodomite but as a weak man, a man who would do anything, give anything, to protect his lover and Topcliffe left triumphant with a fish hook in both of their hearts, ready to reel them in whenever it suited him.

He’ll manage it eventually, of course. Topcliffe has Kit in his pocket now. Kit will never be his master as Lord Walsingham is, nor yet his equal, whatever he thinks, and there will always be another trap. Thomas cannot protect him from all of them and one day Topcliffe will see him try and that will be an end to them both.

“I _paid_ you, you-” The night is cold, his words come sputtering from his mouth in puffs of hot steam. Kit paces beside him, uncharacteristically patient. There is a fine mist of rain in the air; it clings to his hair like a net of diamonds and Thomas stares despairingly at his arrogant, ignorant, beautiful face and cannot think of one bad thing to say about him.

“I haven’t spent it yet. Burbage is paying me to write for him exclusively, Henslowe is paying me not to write anything at all. Have your money back if it means so much to you.”

“I don’t want your money, Kit.” And he doesn’t, though the payments have put him behind on several bills and his tailor is agitating and sending him notes that all start _I am sure, goode sir, that thou hast merely…_

“You really are furious with me,” Kit says, suddenly chastened and staring at this new and horrifying aspect of his lover, as if he doesn’t know full well that it is fear which has set Thomas’s face into a pale mask of itself and fear for Kit at that. “What _do_ you want? If God’s forgiveness has a price then surely thine does also?”

What does he want? To hold Kit’s life, nestled like a bird between his cupped hands, safe from all the world. To bring him to his grand home and show him off there and have his uncle acknowledge his choice through more than snide words and warning looks. To see Barrett dead and buried and Kit forgetful of his grave.

“I want...I want...” his breath swirls about him like a dragon’s. He knows what Topcliffe wants. Topcliffe likes pretty women, pretty men, pretty children too, he’s fairly sure, though he hasn’t managed to get any proof of it, try as he might. But what Topcliffe likes most of all is pain; the grating sound of a knife hitting bone and the first, red, secret split that appears in overstretched flesh. Most of all he likes the way it changes the faces of his victims, makes them twist and blanch or fill with bright flushes of blood as the whim of their nature dictates. Topcliffe wants Kit for a spy, certainly, wants him sniffing out Catholics for him and charming traitors into his arms but not as much as he wants to splay him wide open and pluck from him one by one the slick, warm pieces of his pride. Thomas has seen in his face that he already finds Kit beautiful and would like to make him prettier still.

He stops walking. He doesn’t know where he’s been taking them anyway, the streets here are unfamiliar to him, slippery with filth and half the doors marked with white quarantine chalk, crosses looming out of the fog like thin ghosts. Kit stops too, exasperated, hands spread wide, ready it seems, to give him anything he asks for.

_What does he want?_

“It doesn’t matter what I want,” he says, finally, “It doesn’t matter what I want at all. You’re what matters Kit, why can’t you understand that?”

For the first time since they’ve met Marlowe seems truly lost for words. He opens his mouth as if for a retort but scoffs wordlessly instead, he wheels away and storms off up the street, then turns and stalks back. He seems almost angry, though maybe he’s just aghast at the monstrous success of his conquest, at finding himself so thoroughly in charge of another’s heart.

“I’m literally offering you anything you want, you idiot” he says, eventually, “I’ll suck your cock in that alley if you ask me to, you can take me home and swive me in that fucking bed you’re always bleating about. Anything you want.” He pushes himself into Thomas, forcing him to brace himself, or be knocked back. “I won’t make this offer twice, you know.”

They are close enough to embrace, so that is what Thomas does. Puts both arms around Kit’s rigid back and slides a hand up into the soft short hairs at the nape of his neck; hopes anyone looking is too busy with their own troubles to care about their two long shadows mingling in the street.

“What do you want, Thomas?” Kit speaks like he might be crying. Thomas hopes not, the wet slide of tears on his neck will undo him utterly and he has already given Kit everything he has.

_Come live with me and be my love..._

“I told you” and maybe it is his profession that makes lying so easy, “I don’t want anything.”

**Author's Note:**

> The working title for this was Spies and Simps and I came *this close* to keeping it.


End file.
